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Vintage Computer Festival Shows Off Ancient PCs
Markgor writes "Just finished looking through some pictures from the recent Vintage Computer Festival in Marlboro, Massachussetts, the first time that it's been held on the East coast. The best pic has to be the one of the Sol-20. Here in Ottawa, we have a bunch of vintage computers sitting in one of our museums, including an Altair, but I haven't seen an intact Sol-20 in a long long time"
Anyone in or near Austin who wants to see some vintage computers should check out the Goodwill Computer Store on US 183 at Ohlen. Lots of old micros there in the back room museum, plus a disk array frame (I think that's what it is) out of a Cray.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
The reason it was so slow was that the 16K it used was the video chip RAM. This is esentially the same chip used in the ColecoVision (except Coleco for some bizarre reason used the RGB version and an RGB video to RF modulator!) In order to use this RAM, you have to tell the video chip the address, then you can read sequential data bytes from it. This is an I/O operation, rather than a normal memory operation. Everything must have been stored out there, including the program and variables.
I learned how slow it was one day when I saw one powered up in a store. I hit the RETURN key and the thing took a whole second of thinking before it did the nothing that I asked it to! That's right, it took a whole second just to do nothing!
When you had a PEB or sidecar RAM, that was in the 64K address space of the CPU, and I've heard that BASIC would know to use that instead. Of course TI discouraged any non-PEB expansion, so sidecar options were only used by the tech savvy. (And not many tech savvy folk went with the TI in the first place.)
The main units (and about two dozen different cartridges) were very common back in the mid 90's when I was collecting classic video game stuff. Except for the old non-A version with the chiclet keyboard, that is. It's the goodies that will set you back.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
And you mean to tell me that, in all of your experience, you still don't know how to format a paragraph?
one transistor.
A transistor? A transistor? You LUCKY BASTARD. When I were a lad we had to switch currents with our teeth, and only when a wire marked "gate", which was shoved up me arse, went live with over a kilowatt.
took up half your backyard.
Half your back yard? You LUCKY LUCKY BASTARD. Ours took over t'town, and town next door. And it were so heavy that people making tide tables used to have to come to me mothers' door and ask where t'computer would be on such and such a date.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
And when you are 10 years old with one of those things(PEB), they are a royal bitch to carry around.
Tell me about it. I was the buffest ten-year-old on the playground, with bigger biceps and triceps than most of the bullies, and I thank Texas Instruments for that.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Aww, that's no fun. Make it into a fish tank instead.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Unlike wine, computers do not get more potent with age.
If you want your PC company to survive, don't name your computer SOL.
have a Teletype ASR-33 console and magnetic core memory. We may laugh now, but in their time, many of the old machines were wonders of engineering and technology. Older teletypes actually encoded and decoded ASCII mechanically. UNIX actually ran on machines with 128KB of RAM. A 5MB removable platter hard drive was HUGE! If only our software matured as fast as the hardware.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The SOL was quite a computer :-) I first learned 8080 assembly language on one.
:-) I still have my paper copy somewhere... Years later, I translated it into 8086 code, in case anyone is interested :-)
:-)
Correction, machine language... I didn't have an assembler at the time, so I photocopied the 8080 instruction set page (note singlular) and went from there. One side of the page had the opcodes and the hex values, the other had the inverse so you could look up an opcode by hex value.
In the time when everyone was selling their $100 to $500 BASIC, Processor Tech gave away their "5k basic" in source code form. Imagine that
Yep, that was a beauty and a beast. The video card had 1k of RAM, mapped as 64x16. What's interesting about the video is that you could reprogram the character bitmaps so that you could get custom "graphics" on that screen, and a clever programmer could do FAST graphics by changing some critical character definitions at the right time.
Don't forget the Northstar floppy disk system. The disks were hard-sectored, so you couldn't just get the ones from Radio Shack to work. I had to drive to the next town to buy one - and they were $5 each at the time...
(Four Yorkshiremen can start any time now
A dingo ate my sig...
- one transistor.
- one bit of memory.
- no hertz.
- a keypad with no keys - just a sharp point that would prick your finger each time.
- a 4dpi video display with one pixel (black) that was fixed to the keypad (underneath).
It cost $80,000, would generate smoke, and took up half your backyard.Yep, those were the days.
I used to work in Ottawa at the museum of science and tech, during the time where they were shifting their computer structure around. We used to have a hall of computers, and there were displays and booths that taught kids about electronics and circuitry through hands on information... kids could manipulate magnetic core memory, and see the information being changed in real time, and have it read back off the core... Ping pong balls and pinball plungers were arranged in such a way that gates were represented in a way which they could wrap their heads around... Oh, and best of all, EVERY computer on display was functional, including the Crown 'micros' from the 60s... every kid got their name or a phrase given to them on a small piece of punch tape printed by devices older than their parents... but it was also kept current, all the way up to the PCs and Macs of the day (this was around 1995). Then the museum got a huge cash infusion from Microsoft and Intel, and suddenly all of the vintage historical machines either got put into storage (some were lucky enough to make it onto display, such as the right arithmetic wing of an old USAF computer) but not in a functional state... hands on became kids sitting in front of twenty pcs playing the latest microsoft educational software and browsing a very limited intranet... as well as easy access to hotmail. I quit my job at the museum after this, and never looked back. I'm throughly disappointed in the computing section that exists at the NMSTC now... it's still in the same state it was in 1995.
Urban Detail
The MA show was the first "East Coast" (VCF East 1.0) version of VCF, and if attendance at the San Jose VCF 3.0 and 4.0 (and projected 5.0) is any indication, VCF East has a bright future ahead of it. Just give it a year or two.
Unlike wine, computers do not get more potent with age.
I beg to differ. Here's a picture of the 32K RAM expansion card (and a few other cards) in a 1981 Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Peripheral Expansion Box. Yes, they're clad in cast aluminum. Yes, the steel chassis is stamped of far thicker metal than the unibody of a Toyota Tercel.
On the other hand, I could beat someone over the head with a stick of SDRAM, but it would be more memorable to the DIMM than to the individual requiring the physical behavior modification.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.